Announcing Rust 1.0.0.alpha.2

Feb 20, 2015 • Steve Klabnik

Today, we are happy to announce the release of Rust 1.0.0.alpha.2! Rust is a
systems programming language pursuing the trifecta: safe, fast, and concurrent.

In accordance with our status report
last week, this is a second alpha release, rather than a first beta release.
The beta release will be six weeks from today, with the final coming six weeks
after that.

We’ve managed to land almost all of the features previously expected for this
cycle. The big headline here is that all major API revisions are finished:
path and IO reform have landed. At this point, all modules shipping for 1.0 are
in what we expect to be their final form, modulo minor tweaks during the alpha2
cycle. See the previous post for more
details.

This coming release cycle is crucial to Rust, as this will be the last cycle
that we recommend nightly builds for most users. Part of the way through the
cycle, around March 9th, we expect to have all major functionality we expect in
1.0 marked as stable; we will fill in stability gaps between then and beta on
March 31st. The beta release will fully introduce the “stable channel”, which
will not allow use of unstable features but will guarantee
backwards-compatibility (after 1.0). Unstable features will only be available
in nightly.